Ground-moving and excavating equipment employs shovels, buckets and the like with which earth, gravel, rock formation and the like are excavated and moved around. Typically, such buckets carry a lip along their digging edges, and the lips in turn mount the digging teeth.
The digging teeth and their connections to the lips of the buckets are subject to the most wear and tear of the entire bucket because they are exposed to constant abrasion, impacts and the like. As a result, they require frequent replacement. Replacing the teeth in accordance with the prior art is relatively time-consuming, and the excavating equipment must sit idle during that time, which is undesirable because it ultimately reduces profits.
There are presently many variations of how the teeth are attached to the adapters and the adapters are in turn attached to the lips of the buckets or shovels. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,413,432, 6,032,390, 6,216,368 and 6,668,472, for example, disclose different approaches for securing teeth to the adapters and/or the adapters to the lip.
The present invention is particularly directed to the manner in which the adapters are secured to the lips or other members of a wide variety of containers used in ground-handling equipment, such as loaders, shovels, buckets, dragline buckets and the like.